Saturday, August 29, 2015

Austrian police opened the back of a truck abandoned on the
side of a motorway to find the bodies of 71 migrants. They had suffocated after
paying smugglers to transport them across the border from neighbouring Hungary.
Despite having made it into the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone, they still
felt the need to travel clandestinely to avoid being fingerprinted and
registered for asylum in Hungary, which would have offered them few opportunities
to work or integrate.

“This tragedy comes as a cruel reminder that the Dublin
Regulation results in death,” commented Hungarian NGO Migszol after the news
broke. “What we need is a safe passage through our country, and for that, we
need to fight the European legislation.”

Under the EU’s Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers registered
and fingerprinted in one country, for example Hungary, can be returned there if
they later try to register an asylum claim elsewhere, say in Germany or the UK.
The rule was designed to determine which member state was responsible for
processing an asylum claim and to deter people from registering multiple
claims. In practice, northern EU states have used it to avoid processing claims
for people already registered in another country - usually frontline states
such as Italy, Greece and Hungary. As well as placing additional pressure on
frontline states, it forces refugees to stay in a country where they may have
no family connections, cannot speak the language, and struggle to support
themselves.

Critics point out the rule places an unfair burden on
frontline states such as Greece and Italy, which are already struggling to cope
with thousands of new arrivals and deters such states from fingerprinting and
registering. Italy in particular has been accused of failing to fingerprint a
significant portion of the 170,000 migrants who arrived there by boat in 2014. For
their part, asylum seekers intent on joining family members in Sweden or
Holland, or on finding work in the UK, are extremely reluctant for their
fingerprints to be loaded into Eurodac, an EU-wide fingerprint database.

Greg O’Ceallaigh, a London-based barrister who deals with
Dublin removals of asylum seekers from the UK back to countries such as Italy,
said that many asylum seekers were taking clandestine routes through Europe to
evade detection until they reached a country where they had a family member or
at least spoke the language. “We see people who have burned the skin off their
fingertips in an effort to avoid being fingerprinted,” he told IRIN. “...There
does need to be a more politically brave response to all of this; a proper
pan-European asylum strategy.”